Potato In The Zen Garden

Artworks by the Polish-Japanese artistic duo − Sławomir Rumiak and Kanon Myokoin − deal with the topic of language created at the interface between science and culture. They are inspired by technology and science, and especially by biological sciences that have been developing dynamically in the recent years, but most of all, they are interested in the cultural phenomena appearing in relation to data interpretation: different kinds of manipulation, conspiracy theories, mystical narratives and political propaganda. Moreover, they pay attention to cultural differences in how we describe this changing world, mostly the differences between the so-called East and West. The exhibition presented at the Polish Institute in Düsseldorf revolves around the theme of Japanese Zen philosophy, often evoked in the context of ecological awareness, obsolescence of antropocentrism, and the so-called new animism.

The title of the show: “Potato in the Zen Garden” combines various references. The Zen Garden as a space for mediation emerged from sophisticated spiritual needs. The potato, imported in the 16th century from Peru to the Christian Europe, seems to lie at the opposite pole. At the beginning, the potato awoke distrust, because it is not a seed-bearing plant indicated by the Bible as apropriate to be consumed by humans (Genesis 1:29-30). In Germany, potatoes were used as pig feed, and in the 18th century, potato cultivation was banned by the French parliament under the premise that it allegedly caused leprosy. The rehabilitation and popularisation of potatoes began only when they were used to combat famine among lower social classes. 

Marie Antoinette, a great advocate of potato cultivation, ennobled the aesthetical qualities of this crop for a while, by decorating her hair with its flowers. Nonetheless, the potato plant − that grows mostly underground − did not become a paragon of beauty: its bulbous, impredictible, amorphic shape cannot be represented with an elegant mathematical formula or a neat origami. The Zen Garden is the exact opposite: economical and well-organized, kept under control, expressing beauty as a projection of the mind. 

The meeting between cultures becomes apparent here. The potato comes from the history and culture of the so-called global West. The Zen Garden originated in Japan, in the East. Describing the world from the point of view of cultural differences is an important assumption in the practice of the Polish-Japanese artistic duo. Potato in the Zen Garden can be understood as a foreign element, as a Zen mutation at the interface between cultures − another inspiration being the Zen thought, transferred by D.T. Suzuki, John Cage and others to the Western culture, where it boosted the development of avant-garde art in the second half of the 20th century. 

Cage referred to Zen rejecting intentionality, trusting chance in his creative process. Rumiak and Myokoin replace chance with life – a crucial part of the project consists of works based on the experiment of “impanting” live organisms into aesthetical constructs, and later observing how life disrupts the abstract order. 

The exhibition “Potato in the Zen Garden” is also a dispute with reductionism-based art that equaled order filtered through the mind with beauty, spirituality, and cosmos, sometimes creating mystical narratives around it. Peter Conrad, in his review of the book “Piet Mondrian: The Studios”, writes: “[Mondrian] objected to the garden behind his studio in Hampstead because it contained too many distracting, ungeometrical trees: the world, remade by him, was a paradise for aesthetes with OCD.”

Profoundly anti-dualistic Zen abolishes the distinction between order and chaos. Rumiak and Myokoin transfer pedantic, Mondrian-like spaces into patches of entangled vegetation, or… plant potatoes in the Zen Garden.

Foto Hanne Brandt © Polish Institute Düsseldorf

Sławomir Rumiak was born in 1972 in Bielsko-Biała. He is a photographer and visual artist with a degree from the Katowice branch of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (1999). He was recognized for his photographic series, including the Prêt-à-Porter project (2004), which consisted of a series of images of women full of references to both art history and the commercialized, objectified image of a woman in mass culture. In 2007, as part of the work “Departure”, he cycled all the way from Poland to Venice. He stopped on the way at camping sites where he slept in his own scale model of the Polish Pavilion at the Art Biennale in Venice. The artist is well-known in Japan, where he has collaborated with Tokyo Il Tempo Gallery and Zeit Foto Salon, published his works in Japanese photo magazines, and lectured at universities. He also curated two exhibitions of Japanese art in Poland: “Simon Yotsuya and Friends, or Bellmer in Japan” (2010, the Contemporary Art Centr “Kronika” in Bytom, Silesian Museum in Katowice) and “Atokata” – a solo exhibition of works by Kishin Shinoyama (2012, Contemporary Art Gallery BWA in Katowice).

Kanon Myokoin is a Japanese graphic designer and photographer from Tokyo. She also deals with drawing and applied art.